Chaplain will return to NIH following discrimination claim

[ludahai]

Hmm, anti-Catholic discrimination in the government.

Chaplain will return to NIH following discrimination claim

Three chaplains for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda say they were wrongfully dismissed because of religious discrimination and in retaliation for their complaints about the way the chaplain’s office is run.

Last month, one of them was reinstated after two federal panels found that NIH discriminated against him because he is Roman Catholic.

At issue in Heffernan’s firing was a generic approach to ministry that allows imams and rabbis to provide spiritual services to Roman Catholics or Protestants and vice versa. The Magnuson Clinical Center’s nondenominational spiritual ministry office includes full-time, part-time and volunteer clerics who visit patients and family members during the week and lead services in the center’s chapel.

Heffernan argued that his Catholic patients have needs only a priest could fulfill, such as administering the sacraments of confession, communion and anointing of the sick.

But the chief chaplain, the Rev. O. Ray Fitzgerald, who is Methodist, disagreed.

Heffernan’s assessment of Catholic patients’ needs is reasonable, said the Rev. Eugene Linehan, a Catholic chaplain who retired from NIH in 1998 after 26 years. Heffernan succeeded him as the full-time Catholic chaplain.

‘‘Catholics have sacramental needs, and only the priest can answer those needs,” Linehan said. ‘‘That’s what we were there to do, and we felt we handled that well.”

So, this Protestant believes a Protestant minister or an Islamic Imam can minister to the needs of Catholics? This is ignorance in the extreme. Only a Catholic or Eastern Orthodox priest can give a Catholic the Sacrament, hear Confession, and administer the Sacrament commonly known as Last Rites!

It is too bad that a supposedly educated Protestant cleric does not understand this and fired a Catholic priest who was providing this service to their patients. Base ignorance! :thumbdown